Willing Willie Show

Whenever I go home from work, I find our househelp watching this nonsensical show, with its feigned sincerity, pre-planned drama, and stupid games. Hiring Shalani is obviously to add on to the ratings.

The comic side of Willie further endears him to his audience. Like when one contestant mistakenly said the title of the song as "You Changed my Life in the Morning" (instead of moment) and Wllie said "Ay hindi, mali, dapat You Changed my Life at Midnight." I found that funny.

But oftentimes,his real persona as lewd, vulgar, and always putting down people is shown. The way he treats his dancers is one. He will say one dancer is better than the other, putting the other girl in an embarrassing position. Shalani meanwhile, often seems like a fish out of water because of scantily clad women all around and here she is regally-personified.

The show's main attraction is doling out cash (P5,000 minimum) to needy people. And because we are a third world country with families living below the poverty line, an empty pocket and stomache is enough motivation to go Novaliches, play stupid games, tell sad stories, and then be given a reprieve even for a day from hunger. People watch and get entertained for free. So if you don't like the show, just get cable. Because the show must go on.

Re: Willing Willie Show

Re. 2006 stampede, I think the courts already decided on his favor right? So in essence, its already a non-issue. You cannot crucify someone who has been to courts and remained unscathed. He is a free bird.

Re: Willing Willie Show

i agree, he was absolved by the courts. however, the ruling centered more on the utter negligence of the pasig city police (who hold jurisdiction in the area outside the ULTRA premises) in imposing proper crowd control measures than on the innocence or the non-involvement of willie. it was him, after all, who bullhorned the masses to gather at ULTRA despite, reportedly, the repeated warnings by the pasig police of a very real FUBAR threat as early as late wednesday evening. so literally, this host was responsible for sending hundreds of poor souls to their deaths, and no legal ruling or precdent will ever change that fact. that's what i meant.

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Re: Willing Willie Show

From the New York Times, and this seemed like the perfect thread for this - - -

Television’s Curse Was Its Blessing

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

Television shows, Web sites and apps are not considered cultural artifacts, and never will be. They’re public health hazards, like cigarettes and junk food.

You can read any book you like, no matter how silly or didactic. Watch any movie, no matter how gory. See any play, no matter how broad. But if you spend even half an hour in front of a screen, you’re risking intellectual damage.

Because of this curse, electronic media can never be as uninhibited and self-congratulatory and morally reckless as pop music, book publishing, Hollywood movies and Broadway theater. Television shows, the commendable and inane alike, exist in a cloud of moral judgment that says the whole medium is corrupt. Individual producers may aim to spite that judgment with libertinism and gimmickry, or submit to it with worthy programs in the “public interest.” But they can’t ignore it.

And that’s why the curse on media may be the best thing that ever happened to it.

Television is a vast wasteland. The mighty words came down like a thunderbolt 50 years ago, from Newton N. Minow, then President Kennedy’s impishly eloquent chair of the Federal Communications Commission. In a May 9, 1961, speech to the National Association of Broadcasters, Minow singled out “The Fred Astaire Show” and “The Twilight Zone” for praise, but condemned most TV as a tiresome march of “game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons.”

Brilliant. Sometimes high moral judgment from the government is exactly what the arts need most.

Vast! Wasteland! Minow attached a stigma to the whole television enterprise, and dared broadcasters to get out from under it. At the same time, he didn’t threaten broadcasters with fines for specific infractions. “Why should you want to know how close you can come to the edge of the cliff?” he asked them, knowing that announcing strict regulations and penalties — in his first speech as F.C.C. chair, no less — would only tempt broadcasters to game them.

In “The Upside of Irrationality,” an enlightening book about the limits of logic, Dan Ariely argues that workers are motivated less by money than by the perception that their work is meaningful. What Minow did for TV broadcasters was assign their meaning to their industry.

He did so by saddling them with an ingeniously difficult task. With that one phrase, he sowed the airwaves with salt, and then instructed broadcasters to cultivate them. No wonder they felt existentially challenged, and immediately pushed themselves to prove him wrong. The nightly news programs on NBC and ABC, “60 Minutes,” “Sesame Street” and the whole of PBS appeared within the decade.

But other broadcasters took a different approach. They reveled in their wastelander status. All right, then, we’ll go to Hell, they decided, like Huckleberry Finn. They created masterpieces of speculation, defiance and satire, including “Star Trek,” “All in the Family” and “Saturday Night Live.”

Minow’s speech had “ruined television,” declared Sherwood Schwartz, the TV producer, who promptly created a formula sitcom with totally unbelievable characters called “Gilligan’s Island.” In an inside joke that Minow came to relish, Schwartz named the show’s doomed ship after him.

In the 1961 speech, Minow imagined a time when “all the forces of art and creativity and daring and imagination had been unleashed.” Bold, operatic words. No chair of the National Endowment for the Arts has ever inspired a flourishing of the fine arts like the one Minow inspired in television.

I met Minow recently at a symposium on his speech at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, his alma mater. Now 85, Minow told me he’s a “television junkie,” with a special love, these days, for “Mad Men.” In 2011, Minow’s in on the secret known to all television junkies: the forces of art and creativity and daring and imagination are now regularly unleashed. Minow deserves a real measure of credit for that.

He also deserves some credit for digital culture. After all, the Minow curse soon attached itself to cable and satellite TV, even as they were not legally beholden to the public interest, as they were not using its airwaves. (Bruce Springsteen’s vast-cable-wasteland dirge, “57 Channels [And Nothin' On],” came out in 1992.) Now the curse sticks to the Internet. Critics of the Internet, in fact, have deepened Minow’s charge. Screen culture, they claim in an evidentiary wasteland, is not just barren; it’s toxic.

No matter. Since the ‘90s, media makers have not only created unrivaled programming, but they’ve erected the digital masterpieces — Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter — whose sweep, programming and ideology of openness and global citizenship are the envy of the world.

Minow is now busy practicing law, digitizing his family’s archives and marveling at the reach and inventiveness of Facebook. (If Web sites were nations, he told the audience at Northwestern, Facebook would be the third-largest nation in the world.) I briefly thought of asking him to take back his “vast wasteland” comment, and concede that electronic media are now chief among America’s crowning cultural glories. But I refrained. Better that the Minow Curse stand. It’s served us well so far.